Text, Image and Colour: A Multimodal Reading of Selected Save The Children Campaign Posters

Abstract

This paper explains the multiple ways in which the Save the Children campaigns deploy visual and textual elements to disseminate powerful messages and evoke emotional responses. Drawing on Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) theory of visual grammar, this paper explicates the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings of the posters. To achieve this, ten save the children posters were collected from their official website and some social media handles, ensuring a mix of themes, target audiences, and time frames to capture a comprehensive range of multimodal strategies. The analysis reveals that these posters use images as sophisticated communication tools to foster emotional connections, highlight urgent needs, and promote active engagement from viewers. However, to enhance visual engagement, integrated messaging, call to action, it was recommended that the posters designers should continue to leverage high-quality and emotionally resonant images, ensure that visual and textual elements are seamlessly integrated, and call to action are more prominently featured.